First Visit - Confirmation

Confirming a client’s first visit is a great way to make sure they’re prepared for an excellent first experience at your studio.

These automations will often prepare the client with important information such as when to arrive, what to bring, what to expect, and if applicable, liability waivers they need to complete before arrival.

Studios commonly setup 2 different types of First Visit - Confirmation automations:

1. Non date specific - These automations will trigger when a client has made their first booking, regardless of the event date. The content and purpose of these automations will be to confirm the client’s booking and send information to prepare them for their first experience.

2. Date Specific - These automations will trigger a specific timeframe before the first event (typically 1 day in advance), confirming the client is still able to attend.

As a client’s first experience could be a group class or appointment, we’ll want to send specific information such as date/time and instructor information using 2 different sets of merge tags:

Merge tags:

For appointments/private sessions, we’ll use the Next Appointment merge tags.

For group classes, we’ll use the Next Visit merge tags.

If your studio offers both appointments and group classes, you’ll want to setup 4 separate automations to ensure clients are receiving the correct information for their upcoming booking. If your studio only offers appointments or group classes, you’ll only need two automations.

You can find all of these automations in our automation catalog.

In this reference guide, we’ll dive into the segmentation of the 4 main types of First Visit - Confirmation automations:

Non Date Specific:

• Appointment: First Appointment is scheduled
• Group Class: First Group Class is scheduled

Date Specific:

• Appointment: First Appointment is Tomorrow
• Group Class: First Group Class is Tomorrow

We’ll also discuss more custom approaches to prepare clients that have already attended, but are scheduled for their first experience of a specific event type. This is a common approach for pilates studios that may want to send specific messaging when a client books the first equipment or mat class.

Where First Visit - Confirmation sequence fits in your client journey

• Prospect Sequence - Prospect creates an account on booking software -> Triggers your prospect sequence of automations based on how many days after creating their account, and no events attended or scheduled for the future.
• First Visit - Confirmation - Prospect books their first event -> No longer (currently eligible for Prospect automations), and will trigger automations for First Visit - Confirmation confirming the date/time of their first booking, and delivering important information to streamline first visit, such as what to bring, when to arrive, what to expect, and link to complete a liability waiver.
• First Event Missed - Prospect misses their first event -> Will trigger your First Event Missed series of automations, then fall back into your Prospect Automations until they reschedule.
• First Visit Follow Up - Prospect attends their first event -> No longer eligible to trigger Prospect automations, and will trigger your First Visit Follow Up automations.

First Visit - Confirmation “Trigger Points” and “Conditional Rules”

Aside from our client rule which will house our Stop Tag, all of the filters we’ll use for First Visit - Confirmation automations will be in the Booking category.

• Booking Count - We’ll use this to either say “client has never attended” or “client has never attended this specific type of event”
• Booking Status - We’ll use this to confirm that if a client has booked before, they’ve never “attended.” We’ll also use this to confirm the client’s upcoming booking has not been early cancelled.
• Booking Event Type - We’ll use this to define the client’s upcoming booking is either an appointment or group class, allowing us to pass event specific information through the associated merge tags.
• Booking Event Start Date - We’ll use this to trigger the automation at a specific time before a client’s first booking.
• Booking Event Name - This will only be used if we want to setup automations for clients that have attended an event before, but will be attending a specific class or appointment type for the first time (such as attending their fist equipment or mat class).

Your First Visit - Confirmation automations will include both types of rules, conditional and trigger points:

Conditional rule: Person has never attended before, or has never attended this specific event before but has attended something else.

Trigger Point: Person has their first event scheduled, or has their first event scheduled in X days from today.

Conditional Rules

The main “conditional” rule we’ll add to these automations simply confirms a client has never attended before, OR, has attended but hasn’t attended a specific event name.

We’ll start with the most common (has never attended)

Rule (contains 2 filters):

• Booking Count = 0
• Booking status = attended

Rule described: Person has never attended an event.

If we want to trigger automations for people that have attended an event, but have not attended a specific event name or event type, we’d use 2 conditional rules. The first will confirm the person has attended at least 1 event, the second will confirm the person has never attended a specific event name. In this example, we’ll assume that we want to trigger an automation if someone has attended something, has never attended an equipment based class, and that all of our equipment based classes contain the word Equipment

Rule 1 (contains 1 filter):

• Booking status = attended

Rule 2 (contains 3 filters):

• Booking count = 0
• Booking status = attended
• Booking event name = Contains “Equipment”

Rule 1 and 2 described: Person has attended something before, but has never attended an event that contains the word “Equipment”

Trigger Points

There will be 2 “trigger points” we’ll use in these automations: Non Date Specific and Date Specific. The booking rules for each will be very similar, only differing by including or not including the filter Booking Event Start Date.

Non Date Specific:

The following rule will trigger when someone books their event, regardless of when that event occurs:

Rule (contains 2 filters):

• Booking Status = Upcoming
• Booking Event Type = [Group Class or Appointment]

This rule would simply trigger when someone has an upcoming booking, for whichever event type (group class or appointment) you’ve selected.

Rule described: person has an upcoming booking for the selected event type (group class or appointment)

Date Specific:

Very similar to the rule above, we’ll simply include one more filter in our booking rule, Booking Event Start Date, which will trigger the automation a set time before the client’s scheduled event.

Rule (contains 3 filters):

• Booking Status = Upcoming
• Booking Event Type = [Group Class or Appointment]
• Booking Event Start Date = [select when the automation should trigger] - this will be the effective “trigger point”

Rule described: person has an upcoming booking which occurs exactly X days from today, for the selected event type (group class or appointment)

First Visit - Confirmation Segmentation

Putting the “conditional rules” and “trigger point” rules together, we’ll outline the full First Visit - Confirmation segment.

In the example below, we’ll assume the first visit is a Group Class so we’ll leverage the filter booking event type = group class and merge tags for Next Visit.

The same segmentation will apply for first visit being an appointment, only difference being our booking event type will be different, booking event type = appointment and the merge tags you’d leverage would be Next Appointment.

Non Date Specific First Visit - Confirmation Segmentation

Rule 1 (contains 2 filters):

• Client profile status = active
• Client tag does NOT have = [select your First Visit - Confirmation opt-out tag if you have one]

Rule 1 described: person has an active profile on my booking software, and we have not added the stop tag for this type of automation.

Rule 2 (contains 2 filters):

• Booking Count = 0
• Booking Status = attended

Rule 2 described: Person has not attended any events at my studio (this is the “conditional” rule).

Rule 3 (contains 2 filters):

• Booking event status = upcoming
• Booking event type = group class

Rule 3 described: Person has an upcoming group class scheduled (this is the effective “trigger” point, which would simply trigger when someone schedules their first event, only if that event is a group class).

The segment above explained: Trigger this automation for people that have never attended (rule 2) and have their first event scheduled, where that first event is a group class (rule 3).

Example Non Date Specific First Visit - Confirmation screen shot

Date Specific First Visit - Confirmation Segmentation

This segment will look almost identical to the segment above, the only difference being we will apply one additional filter to the last booking rule, booking event start date which will define when this automation will trigger in relation to the client’s first upcoming visit.

Rule 1 (contains 2 filters):

• Client profile status = active
• Client tag does NOT have = [select your First Visit - Confirmation opt-out tag if you have one]

Rule 1 described: person has an active profile on my booking software, and we have not added the stop tag for this type of automation.

Rule 2 (contains 2 filters):

• Booking Count = 0
• Booking Status = attended

Rule 2 described: Person has not attended any events at my studio (this is the “conditional” rule).

Rule 3 (contains 3 filters):

• Booking event status = upcoming
• Booking event type = group class
• Booking event start date = tomorrow

Rule 3 described: Person has an upcoming group class scheduled for tomorrow (this is the effective “trigger” point, which will trigger the day before someone’s first event, only if that event is a group class).

The segment above explained: Trigger this automation for people that have never attended (rule 2) and have their first event scheduled “tomorrow”, where that first event is a group class (rule 3).

Example Date Specific First Visit - Confirmation screen shot

First upcoming event (date specific) for a specific event name

Hopefully by now you’re able to read the booking rules and understand how they’re functioning, and also how adding additional filters to those booking rules allows you to be more specific.

This last example we’ll provide is a common custom automation for pilates studios, but is used in a variety of different studio modalities that work with LoopSpark.

In this example we’ll trigger an automation 1 day before someone’s first equipment based pilates class. This is a great strategy to deliver event specific information, such as how this type of class might differ from other events the client has attended, what to expect, how to prepare etc.

The reason we want this type of automation to be date specific is how we’ll be leveraging our merge tags. If we want to confirm a person’s first equipment based class passing date/time/instructor name through merge tags, we want to make sure the person has no other upcoming events before that class (example: Person has a class tomorrow, but their first equipment based class is in 14 days.)

We’ll assume a few things in this example:

• The client has attended at least 1 event before (This automation will not trigger for their fist ever upcoming event, just their first pilates equipment class).
• All of our equipment based classes contain the word equipment This will make it easier for us to build the audience using the “contains” operator in our filter booking event name otherwise, we can individually select applicable event names if our classes do not contain a common word or phrase.
• The client has never attended an equipment based class
• The client has an equipment based class scheduled “tomorrow” (ie - their first equipment based class)

Rule 1 (contains 2 filters):

• Client profile status = active
• Client tag does NOT have = [select your First Visit - Confirmation opt-out tag if you have one]

Rule 1 described: person has an active profile on my booking software, and we have not added the stop tag for this type of automation.

Rule 2 (contains 2 filters):

• Booking Status = attended

Rule 2 described: Person has attended at least 1 event at my studio (this is the first “conditional” rule we’ll apply).

Rule 3 (contains 3 filters):

• Booking count = 0
• Booking status = attended
• Booking event name contains “equipment”

Rule 3 described: Person has never attended an event that contains the word “equipment” (this is our second “conditional rule” applied, and when adding to the logic of the next rule, we’ll see the upcoming equipment based class will be their first)

Rule 4 (contains 3 filters):

• Booking event status = upcoming
• Booking event name contains “equipment”
• Booking event start date = tomorrow

Rule 4 described: Person has an upcoming equipment based class scheduled for tomorrow (this is the effective “trigger” point, which will trigger the day before someone’s first equipment based class).

The segment above explained: Trigger this automation 1 day before a person’s first equipment based class (rules 3 and 4), only if the person has attended at least 1 event prior (rule 2).

Example First upcoming event (date specific) for a specific event name screen shot

Automation Catalog

Need help building your First Visit - Confirmation automations, or want to add a few more touch points? We have plenty of templates in our automation catalog to get you started:

1. Click on Automations -> Catalog
2. Locate the categories First Appointment - Confirmation and First Group Class - Confirmation
3. Select the automations you’d like to add to your account.